Behind the scenes of Higgins Armory deal

Sunday

Jan 26, 2014 at 6:00 AMJan 26, 2014 at 10:15 PM

By Shaun Sutner TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

WORCESTER — The dissolution of the Higgins Armory Museum and the transfer of its valuable collection to the Worcester Art Museum unfolded amid a bitter proxy fight by a Higgins granddaughter and scrutiny by the state Attorney General's office.

A year after the deal between the two local museums was announced, the art museum will open its first exhibition of the Higgins armory pieces to the public with fanfare on March 29.

But the transaction — which will give the art museum about $6 million in Higgins assets and more than 2,000 pieces of a "core collection" of medieval armor and armaments — was not officially approved by Attorney General Martha Coakley and the state Supreme Judicial Court until late last month.

The key parts of the agreement approved by the AG and SJC are 15 legal covenants that, among other things, are intended to protect the integrity and identity of the Higgins collection and reserve Higgins funds for the conservation, display and acquisition of armor items.

At the same time, the covenants give the art museum leeway to display Higgins pieces as it sees fit.

The 42,000-square-foot art-deco armory museum closed Dec. 31 after Higgins officials said it would not be able to raise enough endowment money to ensure its future.

As the next chapter unfolds, critics remain frustrated by what they claim was the failure of the Higgins trustees to fully explore alternatives or hire a permanent director.

Among the options opponents say were not considered: a major capital campaign reaching outside of Worcester, a public fund-raising appeal, and retrofitting the unique Higgins glass and steel building for solar or wind power.

"The Worcester Art Museum is getting everything without having to do anything," said Clarinda Higgins of Westport, Conn., 64, a longtime Higgins incorporator and the granddaughter of Worcester industrialist John Woodman Higgins, who opened the museum in 1931.

"It's a beautiful building. No one did anything ... to save it," said Richard Johnson, a Worcester native and curator of the New England Sports Museum in Boston.

Higgins trustees maintain they weighed and rejected all the options suggested by the critics — including retrofitting and fund-raising studies over the last decade — in favor of a painful, but more long-term solution.

And they say trustees and incorporators have been fully informed that Higgins administrators and trustees were exploring a merger with another institution.

In fact, James C. Donnelly Jr., the Worcester lawyer who guided Higgins trustees as president through the merger, noted similar proposals had been openly floated for three decades.

In recent years, Higgins rejected an offer from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to take the armory collection and store it for 10 years before any display. Another offer from Philadelphia was likewise turned down, Mr. Donnelly said.

Mr. Donnelly asserted that Ms. Higgins and her allies — especially Mr. Johnson and his brother Robert Johnson, a retired curator in San Francisco — were driven by familial and nostalgic connections.

They wanted the armory museum as it always had been, and could not accept that last-ditch fundraising, or even a broad public appeal that he said the trustees considered, would only prolong things and not prevent the inevitable failure of the museum.

"They're acting out of grief. You can't keep the past alive and make the future better," Mr. Donnelly said. "I respect their feelings and understand their feelings. It would be great to please everybody, but you have to make decisions. It was the right decision."

He said a financial disaster, such as bankruptcy a decade from now, would have made it much harder to find a good home for the Higgins artifacts with assurances to maintain the museum's legacy of children and family programs and reverence for medieval armor and weaponry.

"The opportunity to do it now on terms as good as we're getting now was the moment to do it," Mr. Donnelly said. "Not only did this transaction keep the Higgins legacy in Worcester, but it also put the Worcester Art Museum in a stronger position than it could have been otherwise."

Minutes from annual meetings in 2010 and 2011 show that trustees were actively looking at ways to solve financial problems, even though the armory museum's tax returns show no expenses for professional fundraising in the final years of the museum's existence.

The vote at the March 27 annual meeting to shutter Higgins and bequeath its most important items to the art museum proved to be a flashpoint in a simmering battle between Ms. Higgins and other Higgins incorporators, and Mr. Donnelly and interim director Suzanne W. Maas.

In the days before the meeting, Ms. Higgins frantically tried to obtain from Mr. Donnelly contact information of current incorporators so she could lobby them to vote against the proposal or obtain their proxies if they could not attend. She claimed that Mr. Donnelly stonewalled her, refusing to provide email addresses or phone numbers and furnishing an incomplete, out-of-date list.

Mr. Donnelly denied the accusations.

"It was not an old list. I gave her everything required by law," he said. Email addresses and phone numbers, he maintained in an e-mail to Ms. Higgins, are confidential and he would have violated incorporators' privacy by releasing them without their consent.

On the eve of the meeting, Ms. Higgins sent overnight mail packages containing proxy forms to as many incorporators as she could locate. In the end, the vote among 69 eligible incorporators was 55 in favor and 10 against, with one abstention. Five of those voting against did not attend and gave their votes, or proxies, to Ms. Higgins.

Ms. Higgins gave a statement at the meeting that itself became part of the controversy.

She alleged that she was hushed up, shown warning placards counting down her time by the minute, and ultimately not allowed to give her full speech — and then booed and hissed, an account confirmed by at least one other incorporator at the meeting. Mr. Donnelly, however, had a different interpretation of the events.

Christian Paluk of Worcester, a former incorporator who joined Ms. Higgins in voting against the transaction, said he felt Ms. Higgins was treated poorly: "I was embarrassed by the behavior. First of all, she's related."

"It was rude," Mr. Paluk, a state trooper, said. "If it was 20 minutes, they should have given her 20 minutes. They had the numbers going into it anyway."

"How many of you were surprised to learn that a secret deal was being made with the Worcester Art Museum?" according to Ms. Higgins' prepared remarks for the meeting. She referred to a June 2012 letter from Matthias Waschek, the director of the art museum, to Mr. Donnelly and Ms. Maas stating that the art museum was facing financial and strategic challenges and sought a formal agreement by early 2013.

Ms. Higgins alleged that a hurry-up meeting in March was pushed to meet the art museum's timetable — illegally she contended, because it violated Higgins bylaws that called for the annual meeting to be held in the second quarter of the year.

"WAM (Worcester Art Museum) has been drooling over the prospect of acquiring the Higgins Armory Museum collection to help them out of their own financial straits," she said in her speech.

Worcester Art Museum officials declined to make Mr. Waschek available for an interview about the Higgins negotiations.

Adam Rozan, the art museum's director of audience engagement, said the story of how the art museum and the Higgins decided to move the collection was not worth rehashing.

"Our story is super focused around the ... opening day (of the Higgins artifacts show, "Knights!")," Mr. Rozan said. "We think it's just an amazing collection that will only be enhanced by showing it with pieces from our collection. It will be a brand new presentation of arts and armor."

Mr. Donnelly said that the meeting date change was not illegal or improper because everyone present, including Ms. Higgins, voted to agree to a motion to change it.

Mr. Donnelly and Ms. Maas acknowledge that they wanted to move quickly so that the art museum would be able to meet a tough deadline for transferring, preparing and displaying the Higgins pieces within a year.

Both museums also needed to move quickly to secure some foundation grants and do other fundraising for the March 2014 show and the Higgins collection in general, both Ms. Maas and Mr. Donnelly said. Higgins ended up raising $2 million and the art museum, $4 million, since last March, they said.

As for Ms. Higgins' reception at the meeting, Mr. Donnelly contended that "Rindy" was not hissed and booed, but some people did express frustration ... I think because they perceived her as ignoring the facts."

"She demeaned the efforts of longtime supporters and volunteers as being insufficient," he added. "She said things that reflected poorly on the city of Worcester generally — essentially arguing that Worcester was not taking proper care of the museum.

"Some of the things she said were patently untrue, and I do recall one or possibly two people interrupting just to say 'Rindy, you just don't know the facts, that just isn't true,'" he said.

Ms. Maas, in an interview, expressed a similar sentiment about Ms. Higgins.

"I know she's mourning this," she said. "When people are in grief sometimes they say things that are not the norm."

Among the five incorporators voting by proxy against the deal was Kent Der Russell, the second to last permanent director of the Higgins and now chief executive and curator of the Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton.

In a recent interview, Mr. Russell said he now accepts the result of the vote and that the Worcester Art Museum will be a good steward of the Higgins pieces.

But he said he thinks the Higgins could have been saved with more vigorous fundraising, noting that the museum, even with a longstanding $450,000 annual deficit largely caused by the building's high occupancy costs, turned a profit while he was there.

"It was just regrettable and a pity that the broad community didn't step up and help sooner in terms of fundraising," Mr. Russell said. "The museum was balancing its budget and thriving while I was there, but it was hard work."

"It's great for the Worcester Art Museum. It catapults the art museum from being a very fine regional museum into a national museum," he continued. "Now it's up to them to make the most of the opportunity."

Contact Shaun Sutner at Shaun.Sutner@telegram.com. Follow him on Twitter @ssutner